Blood Impulse

Part 6.2

Aragonian Sector, Battleship Singularity

"We're going to be okay," Lieutenant Keifer Robinson murmured between kisses. Another twenty hours had passed since the nuke, and slowly, very slowly, things were returning to normal.

The ship? Well, it was still nothing short of a wreck, but the crew members that had survived without major injury were continuing to do what they usually did. For Lieutenants Robinson and Galhino, that meant stealing kisses in the corridor.

"I never said we weren't," Galhino told her, wrapping fingers up in Keifer's soft brown hair.

Robinson pulled Galhino just a little closer, "You tried to mutiny, Maria." They were both exceptionally lucky that the rest of the bridge crew had not told Colonel Zarrey. The ship's XO was brash and vulgar, but while he had his odds with the Admiral, Zarrey remained loyal to him.

"So what?" Maria said, going in for another kiss on the lips, "It's not like it matters as long as everyone keeps quiet. The Admiral's effectively dead." Zarrey didn't have the guts to terminate the man's command and take over officially, but chances were that the Admiral's coma would be fatal. "Good riddance."

Keifer pulled away from her lover. "Maria, I would not be here without him." She admitted that she found the Admiral terrifying, but she still owed him a great deal, and because of that, so did Maria. "If he hadn't accepted my transfer request..."

"The old bastard didn't know what he was doing, Keifer. He doesn't know you, and he doesn't care about what you went through aboard the Ariea." Such things were below the Steel Prince. "We don't need him. No one will care when he dies." In fact, a great many people in the worlds would be quite relieved to hear of his passing.

"Maria..."

"He took people with transfer requests into his crew because he knew that those people would feel indebted to him, because he knew that they would be loyal, no matter what sick thing he ordered them to do." His order to turn of the artificial gravity and unnecessarily murder a hundred of the crew was a prime example. "You heard him as well as I did. We're a numbers game to him."

Keifer had heard him say that, but it did not make sense. "Then why would he give his life to save us?" If they were just game pieces to him, why would he go activate that power core instead of grabbing anti-radiation meds and abandoning ship while they were unconscious?

If Maria could have blamed him saving them all on an accident, she would have. "It was probably because he wanted to save the ship, not because he wanted to save us." Saving the ship had just happened to entail saving the crew as well. In that way, she supposed it was a happy accident. "You know how he is about that," she said resentfully.

Admiral Gives rarely corrected anyone on anything, unless it was decorum that dealt with the ship. The man had not even cared about the pilots throwing streamers in the Marines' barracks or the Marines taping 'KICK ME' signs on the back of the pilots' flight suits, but the moment someone was getting casual with the Singularity's controls, he set them straight with unparalleled efficiency.

"That's not fair, Maria," the communications officer said. "It's really easy for someone to get hurt when they handle the ship." It made a whole lot of sense to correct people in those cases. "He kept his distance from our personal lives, sure, but there is nothing wrong with that." Coming from a previous assignment where the commanding officer failed to keep such a distance, she was more than grateful for it.

"That doesn't change the fact that nobody's going to miss him," Maria countered. "The man is a sociopath." They were lucky that they had not yet been put in an expendable position. He would have killed them with little thought about it.